Lieut-Colonel Kenneth Mason MC (10 September 1887 – 2 June 1976) was a British soldier and explorer notable as the first statutory professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His work surveying the Himalayas was rewarded in 1927 with a Royal Geographical Society Founder's Medal, the citation reading for his connection between the surveys of India and Russian Turkestan, and his leadership of the Shaksgam Expedition. Personal life Kenneth Mason was born at Sutton, Surrey, the son of Ellen Martin (née Turner) and Stanley Engledue Mason, a timber broker. He was educated first at Homefield Preparatory School, where he was savagely beaten, but regarded such treatment with equanimity, offering the opinion that "If every silly ass that grows a beard and sits down in the London roads to demonstrate had been well and truly beaten when young, he too might have learned sense!". Mason went on to Cheltenham College, where he excelled in Mathematics and prepared for exams required to enter the army. He was successful and joined the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1905. Mason married Dorothy Helen Robinson in 1917 and they had two sons and one daughter. Devoted to the Drapers' Company, Mason became its Master in 1949. Soldier and Surveyor Mason was commissioned into the Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant in 1906, then sent to the Royal School of Military Engineering where he learned surveying, mechanics, topographic sketching, musketry, revolver shooting, and ballistics. He was posted to the Survey of India in 1909 and, having sailed for Karachi, helped to pioneer stereoscopic techniques that were to revolutionise cartography using aerial and land-based photogrammetry. 1910-1912 saw him directed by Sir Sidney Burrard to execute precise triangulation in Kashmir that would link up British mapping of India to surveys performed in Russia. The work involved learning climbing techniques and Mason taught himself to ski, coordinating large teams of men and pack animals working in hazardous locations. As he recalled in an oral history of life under the British Raj broadcast by BBC Radio: With the outbreak of the First World War, Mason's military service took him to France. He saw action in the Neuve Chapelle sector and Loos before, in January 1916, landing at Basra, Iraq. In action connected to the relief of Kut, he led a night march to the flank of the Dujailah redoubt, and was subsequently awarded the Military Cross. He entered Baghdad